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Abstract The emergence and dissemination of new legal ideas can play an important role in sparking change in the way activists in marginalized communities understand their rights and pursue their objectives. How and why do the legal beliefs of such communities evolve? We argue that the vigorous advocacy of new legal ideas by entrepreneurs and the harnessing of specialized media to help disseminate those ideas are important mechanisms in this evolution. We use the rise of marriage equality as a central legal priority in the mainstream American LGBTQ+ rights movement as a case study to illustrate this phenomenon. Using a mixed-methods analysis of Evan Wolfson’s legal advocacy and an examination ofThe Advocate, we investigate how Wolfson developed and disseminated legal ideas about same-sex marriage. We show how this advocacy eventually dominated discussion of the issue among elite LGBTQ+ legal actors and the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ publication. However, Wolfson’s advocacy tended to emphasize LGBTQ+ integration into “mainstream” American culture and prioritized the interests and values of relatively privileged subgroups within the LGBTQ+ community. Our research informs our understanding of the interplay between legal advocacy and media reporting in the development of LGBTQ+ rights claims and the strategies adopted to achieve them.
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This content will become publicly available on February 1, 2026
The Effect of Judicial Decisions on Issue Salience and Legal Consciousness in Media Serving the LGBTQ+ Community
Scholars have long questioned whether and how courts influence society. We contribute to this debate by investigating the ability of judicial decisions to shape issue attention and affect toward courts in media serving the LGBTQ+ community. To do so, we compiled an original database of LGBTQ+ magazine coverage of court cases over an extended period covering major decisions, includingLawrence v. Texas(2003),Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health(2003), andLofton v. Secretary of Department of Children & Family Services(2004). We argue these cases influence the volume and tone of LGBTQ+ media coverage. Combining computational social science techniques with qualitative analysis, we find increased attention to same-sex marriage after the decisions inLawrence,Goodridge, andLofton,and the coalescence of discussions of courts around same-sex marriage afterLawrence.We also show how LGBTQ+ media informed readers about the political and legal implications of struggles over marriage equality.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2043745
- PAR ID:
- 10588775
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Political Science Review
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Political Science Review
- Volume:
- 119
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0003-0554
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 108 to 123
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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